Editor's Note
02.26.01

I hope that you enjoy David's ideas.

Best Wishes,

bgcolor="#003366" face="Arial, verdana" size="4">Making Your Web Site Compelling

The great news is that your site can start becoming sticky and viral
right away by employing a few simple tools. Before we start looking
at these tools that you may add to your site, it is important to
remember that this works best if you add them into all your pages,
emails, and products, as much as is possible to do so. Here we go:

Email To A Friend

On every page on your site, you should make it easy for people to
send that page to their friends. Did you know that most people would
look at something their friends send them? The number one rule of
making something viral is making it easy to spread. Make sure that
each page has a clear link or icon that invites the user to send the
page to their friend. When they click on it, they should be able to
send simply by entering their name and their friend's email address
- keep it simple. The only other bit of information you may want to
ask them for is their friend's name for personalization
purposes. To add such functionality to your site, you will need to
download a free script. There are plenty to choose from. You can
find one in the Webmasters Specials CGI Scripts category at
www.aboutwebmasters.com.

Free tools and products that pass on

Offer a free version of your product, or something else free. Make
sure that it is useful; otherwise no one will really care about it.
Ensure also that it is very easy for users to pass on these free
products to their friends. If you can integrate this passing on as
part of product use, then you have it made because by using the
product, the person will have to tell their friends about it.
Something you can quickly make is a screensaver and wallpaper.
Download a good product for making these (see www.download.com),
get some good images and create a quality screensaver and wallpaper.
You can add your site URL and description to some screens on the
screensaver. Then submit the screensaver and wallpaper to popular
download sites such as ZDNet.com and Download.com. Every time
someone downloads and uses the screensaver, they get to know about
your site.

Forums, Chat, Community and Office Tools

Provide ways through which your site visitors can add content to
your site and communicate with each other. Have forums, chat, and
possibly instant messaging. One way to easily add this to your site
is using www.everyone.net. Offer free office tools, too, such as
calendars, file sharing, to-do lists, group tools, and more. You
can do so easily and for free my signing up with www.myevents.com.

Postcards

People love sending postcards. Blue Mountain Arts made history when
it was acquired for over 800 million dollars, yet all it did was
allow people to send electronic postcards to each other. The magic
here is that if someone sends a friend a card from your site, that
friend will almost always want to pick it up, and to do so they
would have to pic it up at your site! That is a great way to get
new users. To start a free postcards service on your site, all
you need is to buy a CGI script that will do all the work for you.
It is very easy. You can find one in the Webmasters Specials CGI
Scripts category at www.aboutwebmasters.com.

Shopping Choice

Amazon.com's success is in a large proportion due to the amount of
choice they give their users. You can buy millions of products right
there. Choice is convenience, hence sticky. So how do you add a
store with millions of related products to your site without taking
on the expense and hassle of running such a huge undertaking? Add
a free Vstore. Its easy and free and you get brand name products
in a wide variety of categories all set up for you in a few minutes.

Newsletter

It is very important that you have a newsletter (or mailing list).
Newsletters work wonders for sites that use them well. Give an
incentive and a reason for someone to join your newsletter. People
are not willing to just hand you over their email address with no
idea what they will be getting for it. The newsletter should always
carry relevant, useful content, nut just advertising. As long as
it is useful, people will love it and pass it on to several friends.
Again, remember to actively ask them to pass it on - you get what
you ask for. If you don't ask them to pass it on, even if they are
willing to, they may just forget or not even thing about it. To
start one, all you need is a mailing list server. You can get a
free one from www.listbot.com or www.egroups.com or use a commercial
one you pay for such as www.sparklist.com.

Free Email

Be another Hotmail. Give away free email accounts. Every time someone
sends email from them, a small signature goes out to their recipient
with your URL and short description in it, just like Hotmail does.
And whenever they check their email they have to visit your site.
You can quickly set up for free as a free email provider at
www.everyone.net.

News And Articles

Your site should always have relevant and ever-new content. One way
of achieving this instantly is to sign up free for iSyndicate's
(www.isyndicate.com) or Moreover's (www.moreover.com) services that
push related news and articles to your site. Give your visitors a
reason to keep coming back to your site by providing fresh relevant
content.

Link Away

Provide easy ways for other sites to link to you. Have a page that
showcases a variety of different banners and other links that
webmasters can place to your site. Give the ready-to-paste HTML for
each of those links to make it easy for webmasters to copy and paste
it to your site. Get an affiliate program so you can pay for
performance. Do all you can do to make it easy, profitable and
interesting for people to tell others about you.

Recommend This Site

Other than an email-this-page and an affiliate program, one more
thing you can do to get people to tell others about you is to add a
recommend-this-site button. Well, most people will never click on
it unless there is something in it for them. So offer them something
free in exchange or a chance to win a big prize. You can sign up
free with Recommend-It (www.recommend-it.com) and they will give
you a neat button that tells your users to recommend your site in
exchange for a chance to win $10,000 - and they supply the prize
money!

These are some of the tools and principles that created and continue
to create businesses that thrive in the new economy. you can
implement all of them on your site in a day if you put your mind to
it, and for very little if any, money. The benefits will be immense
if you do it right. More than anything else, stickiness and a viral
nature are the most important elements of marketing online
businesses, arguably even more than branding and advertising. For
if you spend millions on branding and advertising a site that is not
sticky or viral, your eventual average customer acquisition costs
will not only be too high to be profitable, but you will be losing
all your visitors and hardly making a sale to them during the short
period of time when they are on your site. So start now, making a
sticky and viral cocktail for your site.

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